Curative Education

Schmidt Number: S-5786

On-line since: 21st August 2004

FIRST LECTURE

25th June, 1924

My
dear Friends,

We
have, as you know, quite a number of children whose development has
been arrested and whom we have now to educate  or again, to
heal, in so far as this is possible. There are several of these
children here in the Clinic at Arlesheim, and you have a number also
at Lauenstein. [The first two
anthroposophical homes for handicapped children.] We shall in
these lectures try to deal with our subject in such a way that
wherever possible our study leads straight on to the practical
application. Then, when Frau Dr. Wegman puts some of the children at
our disposal for demonstration  for this is permissible among
ourselves  we shall be able also to discuss certain cases with
the child immediately in front of us. To begin with, however, I want
to speak more in general about the nature of such children.

It
is obvious, in the first place, that a thorough knowledge of
education for healthy children should already be possessed by one who
wants to educate incompletely developed children. For the very things
we notice in incompletely developed children, in children who are
suffering from some illness or abnormality, can also be discerned in
the so-called normal life of soul; only, they show themselves there
less plainly, and in order to recognize them we must be able to
practise a more intimate and close observation. In some corner of the
life of soul of every human being lurks a quality, or tendency, that
would commonly be called abnormal. It may be no more than a slight
tendency to flights of thought, or an incapacity to place the words
at the right intervals in speaking, so that either the words fall
over each other or else the listener could go for a walk between
them.

Irregularities of this kind  and they are to be found also in
the life of will and of feeling  can be noticed, at all events
to some slight degree, in the majority of human beings. We shall have
something to say about them later on, because for anyone who sets out
to deal, educationally or medically, with serious irregularities,
these slighter ones will be of importance as symptoms. And one must,
you know, be able to make one's own careful study of symptoms, in the
sense in which the doctor speaks of symptoms by which he recognises
illnesses. He speaks indeed also of the complex of symptoms which
enables him to take a survey of the disease-process; but he never
confuses the complex of symptoms with what is really the essential
nature and content of the disease itself. Similarly, in the case of
an incompletely developed child, we must regard what can be observed
in his life of soul simply as symptoms.

Psychography,
as it is called  descriptive psychology  is really
nothing but symptomatology, the study and knowledge of symptoms. When
psychiatry today limits itself to describing abnormal phenomena of
thinking, feeling and willing, this means no more than that it has
made progress in accurate description of complexes of symptoms; and
as long as it cannot get beyond this point, it is quite incapable of
penetrating to the essential nature of the illness. It is, however,
most important that we should be able to do this, to perceive what
the being ill really means. And in this connection I
want to ask your attention to the following. You will find it
helpful. Try to grasp it and hold it clearly before your minds.

Suppose
we have here [A drawing was
made.] the physical body of the human being, as it confronts
us while the little child is growing. Then we have the life of soul,
rising up, as it were coming forth from this physical body. This life
of soul, which can show itself in varied expressions and
manifestations, may be normal or it may be abnormal. But now the only
possible grounds we can have for speaking of the normality or
abnormality of the child's life of soul, or indeed of the life of
soul of any human being, is that we have in mind something that is
normal in the sense of being average. There is no other criterion
than the one that is customary among people who abide by ordinary
conventions; such people have their ideas of what is to be considered
reasonable or clever, and then everything that is not an expression
of a normal life of soul (as they understand it) is for
them an abnormality. At present there is really no other criterion.
That is why the conclusions people come to are so very confused. When
they have in this way ascertained the existence of abnormality,
they begin to do  heaven knows what!  believing they
are thereby helping to get rid of the abnormality, while all the time
they are driving out a fragment of genius! We shall get nowhere at
all by applying this kind of criterion, and the first thing the
doctor and teacher have to do is to reject it and get beyond the
stage of making pronouncements as to what is clever or reasonable, in
accordance with the habits of thought that prevail today.
Particularly in this domain we must refrain from jumping to
conclusions, and simply look at things as they are. What have we
actually before us in the human being?

Let
us look right away from this life of soul, which emerges only by
degrees and in which a part is often played by teachers 
concerning whom perhaps the less said the better!  let us look
away from this life of soul, and then we find, behind the bodily
nature, another life of soul, a spirit soul, which makes its descent,
between the time of conception and birth, from the spiritual worlds.
For the first-mentioned life of soul is not that in man which
descends from spiritual worlds. The life of soul which descends from
the spiritual worlds is something quite different, and is not, in the
ordinary way, perceptible to earthly consciousness. This whole life
of soul that comes down from the spiritual worlds takes possession of
the body which is being built up from the sequence of generations in
accordance with heredity. And if this soul-life is of such a kind
that it tends, when it lays hold of the liver-substance, to form a
diseased liver, or if it finds in the physical and the etheric body
some inherited tendency to disease, which gives rise to a feeling of
illness, then disease will make its appearance. Similarly, any other
organ or nexus of organs may be faultily inserted into what comes
down from the world of soul-and-spirit. When the connection has been
made, when the union has come about between what comes down and what
is inherited, when this entity of soul-and-body has been formed, then
there arises  but even then no more than as a reflection in a
mirror  that which we know ordinarily as our life of soul, as
it manifests in thinking, feeling and willing. This soul life that
manifests in thinking, feeling and willing is, however, as we said,
no more than a reflection, it is really just like a reflection in a
mirror. It is all obliterated when we fall asleep. The really
permanent soul-life is behind; it makes its descent and passes
through repeated earth-lives. And if we ask where it is in man, the
answer is: It has its seat in the organisation of the body. How is
this to be understood?

Let
us think first of the human being in his three systems: nervous
system, rhythmical system and metabolism-limb system. You will
understand me when I say that the nerves-and-senses system is
localised principally in the head; we can therefore speak 
although, of course, diagrammatically only  of the head system
when we are referring to the nerves-and-senses system. This is more
literally correct in the case of the very young child, where the
upbuilding function of the nerves-and-senses system proceeds from the
head and works thence into the whole organism. The nerves-and-senses
system, then, is localised in the head. It is a synthetic system.
What do I mean by that? It brings together all the activities of the
organism. In the head is contained, in a sense, the whole human
being. When we speak of hepatic activity  and we ought really
to speak always of the activity of the liver, for what we see as
liver is nothing but a liver process that has become fixed 
this liver activity is, naturally, entirely in the lower body; but
for each such nexus of functions there is a corresponding activity in
the head. Here, shall we say, is the liver activity. And there is a
correspondence to this liver activity in a particular activity in the
human head or brain. Here in the lower body, the liver is relatively
separated from the other organs, from kidneys, stomach and so on. But
in the brain everything flows together, the hepatic activity flows
together with the other activities; so that the head is the great
synthesizer of everything that is going on in the organism. And the
effect of all this synthesized activity is to set up a destructive
process, a process of breaking down. Substance falls away.

Whilst
we have thus in the head a synthesizing process, in the whole of the
rest of the organism, and especially in the metabolism-and-limbs
system, we have an analysing process; here, in contrast to the head,
everything is kept separate. Whereas in the head, the renal activity
takes place together with the intestinal activity, in the rest of the
organism the several activities are held apart. In the head, however,
everything flows together, it is all synthesized.

Now
this flowing together  accompanied as it is by a continual
falling away of substance, like rain  this synthetical
activity of the head lies at the basis of all our thought activity.
For what has to happen in order that man may be able to think? That
which enters into man from out of the realm of soul and spirit,
enabling him to come forth and be active in the world  this
soul-and-spirit nature of his has to be endowed, in the region of the
head, with the synthesizing function and so be capable of
synthesizing in the right way the inherited substance; then this
harmoniously synthesized hereditary substance can become a mirror.
When, with the descent of soul and spirit, the synthesizing activity
begins to take place in the head, the head becomes a mirror; the
outer world is reflected in it, and this produces the thinking that
we ordinarily observe. We must therefore distinguish between two
functions or activities of thinking: there is first the one which
takes its course behind the realm of the perceptible, and builds the
brain  this one is the permanent element in human thinking;
and then there is the thinking function that is not real in itself
but only a reflection. This latter function is obliterated every time
we fall asleep; it subsides as soon as we stop thinking.

Another
part of what comes down from the realm of spirit and soul builds up
the system of metabolism and limbs  analytically, building
there organs which are separate one from another and have each their
own clearly distinguishable outlines. If you set out to study the
whole human body with its several clearly distinguishable outlines,
then in this body you find liver, lungs, heart and so on. With all of
these the metabolism-and-limbs system is connected. The rhythmic
system we do not see; everything which is filled with physical
substance belongs to the system of limbs and metabolism; even what we
can see of the brain is metabolism. Now it is these single,
analytically built-up organs that lie at the basis of the whole life
of will in the human being, just as the synthesizing activity lies at
the basis of thinking. Whatever we have in us in the way of organs is
the foundation for our life of will.

And
now let us think of a human being who has arrived at the stage of
being grown-up. What has happened to him while he has
been living his earthly life? He reached the age of seven and got his
second teeth, he grew to be fourteen years old and attained puberty,
finally he reached the age of twenty-one, when the consolidation of
his soul-life took place. If we want to have any understanding at all
of the development of the child, we must clearly distinguish between
the body a human being has who has passed through the change of
teeth, and the body of a very young child who has not yet experienced
the change of teeth. As a matter of fact, what can be observed by
comparing these two outstanding examples, is happening continuously.
The body changes with each year that passes. We are perpetually
thrusting something out from our body; a streaming outwards, a
centrifugal impulse is at work all the time, pushing the body out.
The consequence is that the body of man is completely renewed every
seven or eight years. This renewal is, however, particularly
significant about the time of the change of teeth, about the seventh
year. For what reason?

The
body which we have from birth till the change of teeth is, in a
sense, nothing else than a model that we take over from our parents;
it contains the forces of heredity, our forefathers have helped to
build it. In the course of the first seven years we thrust off this
body. And what have we then? A completely new body comes into being;
the body that man has after the change of teeth is not built up by
the forces of heredity, but entirely by the spirit-and-soul which has
descended. The human being has his body of inherited substance until
the change of teeth, and no longer; but while he is thrusting off
this body, he builds up a new body, working from out of his own
individuality. Thus only since the change of teeth have we had what
we may call our own body. But the inherited body is used as a model;
and according as the life of spirit-and-soul is strong or weak, will
it either be in a position to proceed in a more individual direction
when confronted with the inherited form, or be subject to the
inherited form  in which case the soul will be compelled to
shape the second body like the first, which was shaped by the
parents. What is usually adduced in the theory of heredity is really
nonsense. For it is assumed that the laws that underlie man's growth
up to the change of teeth simply continue into later life; whereas
the truth is, that the influence of heredity has to be reckoned with
only until the change of teeth, and no further; the individuality
then comes in and builds the second body.

We
must therefore distinguish, when speaking of a child, between the
body of heredity and the individual body which is its successor. The
individual body  and this body alone can truthfully be called
the personal body of the human being  develops by degrees.
Between the seventh and fourteenth years the very strongest activity
of which the individuality is capable goes forward. Either, the
individuality conquers during this period the forces of heredity, and
then it can be observed in the child that, after the change of teeth,
he begins to work his way out of the forces of heredity  the
fact will be clearly perceptible, and we teachers must take note of
it  or, the individuality is completely subject to the forces
of heredity, to what is contained in the model, with the result that
the hereditary likeness to the parents simply continues beyond the
seventh year. But it all depends, you see, upon the individuality,
not upon the forces of heredity. Suppose I am an artist and you give
me something to copy and I change it very considerably. Just as
little as I can say that you are responsible for my picture, just so
little can it be said that a person has acquired through heredity the
body he bears from the seventh year onward. This truth we must master
thoroughly, and then be able to know for ourselves in any particular
case how strongly the individuality is working.

Between
the seventh and fourteenth years every human being passes through a
process of growth and development which expresses, as strongly as in
his case is possible, the individuality he has brought down with him.
In this period of his life the child is thus comparatively shut off
from the external world; and we teachers have opportunity to watch
during these years the wonderful unfolding of the forces of the
individuality. But now, if this development were to continue after
the fourteenth year, if the human being were to go on into later life
with nothing further than this unfolding of individuality, he would
become a person who was perpetually refusing and rejecting everything
that approached him, a person utterly without interest in the world
around him. That this does not happen is due to the fact that, during
the aforesaid period, he is all the time building his third body,
which manifests at puberty, and this third body is built up to accord
with  to bear right relation to  the forces in the
earthly environment. The relation of the sexes is not the whole
thing; the exaggerated importance given to it is just a consequence
of our materialistic turn of mind. In reality, all connections with
the outer world which begin to make their appearance at puberty are
fundamentally of the same nature. We should really speak, therefore,
not of sexual, but of earthly maturity. And under earthly maturity we
have to include the maturity of the senses, the maturity of the
breathing  and another such sub-division will also be sexual
maturity. This gives the true picture of the situation. The human
being, then, reaches earthly maturity. He begins to take again into
himself what is outside and foreign to him; he acquires the faculty
of being sensitive and not indifferent to his environment. Before
this time, he is not susceptible to the other sex, neither is he
susceptible to his whole environment. Thus does the human being form
and develop his third body, which is active in him until the
beginning of the twenties.

What
descended from the spiritual world reached a kind of end at the time
of the change of teeth; but it has continued to work, right until the
twentieth year. It has already taken form in the organs which are now
there, and has given the human being individual maturity, and earthly
maturity. Suppose that now some abnormality shows itself in the life
of soul, which reflects  and is in conformity with  the
structure of the organs, and is conditioned by the whole development
of the human being. We shall then manifestly have an abnormality of
soul, that has come about in this way. But if, after the human being
has passed his twenty-first year, an abnormality appears in the liver
or in some other organ, this organ is by then so much on its
own and so detached, that the will  in its inner soul
aspect  can keep itself independent of it. This is less and
less possible the further one goes back into the years of childhood.
But in a grown person the soul-life has become relatively
independent; the organs already have a definite direction, and the
oncoming of illness in an organ will not work so strongly upon the
soul-life, and can therefore be treated simply as a disease in that
organ. In the very young child, however, everything is still working
together; a diseased organ still works into the life of soul 
and very actively.

The
diseases usually diagnosed by our modern pathology are the cruder
illnesses; the subtler illnesses are not really accessible to
histology. These lie in the fluids that permeate an organ, such as
the liver, for instance; in the movement of the fluids  or
even of the air  through that organ. The warmth permeating the
organ is also of quite special significance for the life of soul. If
therefore we are dealing with a child who shows evidence of a defect
in the will, the first thing we must do is to ask ourselves: with
what organ is the defect in the will connected? Is there some organ
showing signs of degeneration or of illness, with which we can
connect the defect in the will? That is the really important
question.

A
defect in the thinking is not of such tremendous importance. Most
defects are really defects in the will; for even when you find a
defect in the thinking, you must look carefully to see to what extent
this defect in thinking is really a defect in will: When someone
thinks too rapidly or too slowly, the thoughts themselves may be
quite correct; the trouble is that the will which works in the
dove-tailing of the thoughts into each other is faulty. We must be
able to discover in all such cases how far the will is a factor. One
can really only be sure that there is a defect in thinking when,
independently of the will, deformations of thought, sense-delusions,
make their appearance. These then arise quite unconsciously in the
human being in the process of relating himself to the outer world.
The mental picture itself becomes irregular, or we have something
like fixed ideas, where the very fact that they are
fixed ideas lifts them out of the sphere of the will. It is therefore
most important we should take pains to discern whether in a
particular case we have to do with a defect in the will or a defect
in the thinking. Defects in thinking fall for the most part into the
strictly medical domain. In the education of incompletely developed
children, we have mainly to do with defects of the will.

And
now look how the entire being of man plays into his development! You
can appreciate this from the description we have been giving. Take
the first seven years. There may be defects due to heredity. It is
during this period that such defects come particularly into
consideration. But now, a hereditary defect should not be regarded in
the terribly mistaken way in which it is regarded by modern science;
it does not fall to our lot by chance, but as a karmic necessity. Out
of our own lack of knowledge  in the spiritual world, of
course  we have chosen a defective body, one that is defective
as the result of the generations. The existence of defective forces
of heredity means that before conception there was a lack of
knowledge of the human organisation. Before a human being comes down
to Earth, he must have an exact knowledge of the human organism;
otherwise he cannot enter into this organism in the right way during
the first seven years, neither can he transform it rightly. The
knowledge about the inner organisation of man which we acquire
between death and a new birth is infinite in comparison with the
scraps of knowledge that have been acquired by external observation
and are to be found in the physiology or histology of today. (As for
the latter, it really amounts to nothing at all!) The knowledge which
we have between death and a new birth and which then sinks down into
the body, and is forgotten because it sinks down, a knowledge that
does not direct itself, with the help of the senses, to the outer
world  this knowledge is immeasurably great; it is however
impaired if, in an earlier life, we neglected to develop interest in
our surroundings or were prevented from doing so.

Suppose
one day a civilisation were to arise that confined human beings in
rooms, keeping them there from morning till evening, so that they
were debarred from taking any interest at all in the outer world.
What would be the result? These human beings would of course by such
a process be precluded from acquiring any knowledge of the outer
world; and this would mean that when they passed afterwards through
death and came into the spiritual world, they would be insufficiently
equipped for getting to know the human organism in this spiritual
world (where all is contained); with the result that when they
descended again to Earth, they would come down with far less
knowledge than one who had in his previous life acquired the faculty
for looking out upon his surroundings with free, open perception.

There
is another secret connected with this. You go through the world. You
think perhaps, as you go through the world, that a single day is of
little importance. And so it is for ordinary consciousness, but not
for that which is building the unconscious within this ordinary
consciousness. If for one single day, as you go through the world,
you observe the world intently and carefully, then this gives you
already the preliminary condition for knowledge of all that is
contained in the body of man. For what is outer world in Earthly life
is spiritual inner world in life beyond the Earth. And we shall have
to speak further of the results that cannot but ensue from our
present civilisation, and of how it comes about that children are
born defective. Those human beings who live shut off from the world
today will all of them at some time or other come down with a lack of
knowledge of the human organism, and they will choose ancestors who
would otherwise have remained barren. It will be precisely those
parents who tend to beget sick or feeble bodies who will be chosen,
while those who would be capable of producing good bodies will remain
sterile. Yes, it is actually so: it depends upon the whole
development of a particular epoch, how a generation, when it descends
again to birth, will be formed and built.

When
we look at a young child, we must see what it is in this child that
has come from the previous earthly life. We must understand why he
chooses organs that are diseased in consequence of the forces of
heredity; and again, why he works himself into this body with an
incompletely developed individuality. Think of the many possibilities
that exist for a child, in this first period up to the change of
teeth, owing to the fact that what has come down is not always quite
able to cope with what it finds before it. There is the possibility,
let us say, of the child having a good model that has been well
developed in the liver; but because the individuality is incapable of
understanding what is contained in the liver, the development of the
same (upon the model provided) during the second life-period is
incomplete, and we have, in consequence, a very significant defect of
will. Precisely in a case where the development of the liver has not
been complete in this second period, has not been in accordance with
the good development of the model, we find a defect in the will. The
child has will, but does not get to the point of carrying it out; the
will remains in the thinking. As soon as ever the child has begun to
do something, he immediately begins to will something else. The will
gets stuck, it is transfixed. For you must know that
the liver is not merely the organ modern physiology describes; it is
pre-eminently the organ that gives the human being the courage to
transform a deed which has been thought of into an accomplished deed.

Imagine
a man who sees a tram about to start, and knows that he has to go to
Basle, but at the last minute cannot get into the tram. There are
people like this! Something holds him back, he does not reach the
point of getting in. This kind of stoppage of the will may sometimes
reveal itself in most curious ways. But wherever it occurs, there is
invariably a subtle defect of the liver. The liver is the mediator
which enables an idea that has been resolved upon, to be transformed
into an action carried out by the limbs. In point of fact, every
organ is there in the body for the purpose of acting as mediator for
something to come about.

I
was once told about a certain young man who had an illness of this
kind. He would be waiting for a tram; but when the tram came, he
would suddenly stop short and not get in. Nobody knew why, he did not
know himself. He simply stood there, rooted to the spot. What was the
cause of this condition? It was a very complicated affair. The young
man's father was a philosopher. He had divided the faculties of the
soul, in a rather singular manner, into ideas, judgments (or
conclusions) and the forces of sympathy and
antipathy. He did not reckon the will among the powers
of the soul. The will was omitted in his enumeration  from
sheer desire on his part, to be honest and not to put forward more
than revealed itself clearly to his consciousness. He carried this to
such a point that it became perfectly natural to him to have no
mental concept of the will at all. Then, at a comparatively advanced
age in life, he had a son. By perpetually ignoring the will he, the
father, had implanted into the liver an inclination not to transform
subjective intentions into deed. This came out in the son as an
illness! And now you can see why the individuality of the son chose
this man for his father. The individuality of the son had no
understanding of how to cope with the inner organisation of the
liver; so he chose a constitution in which he need not trouble
himself about the liver, a constitution in which the liver was
lacking in the very function he had himself failed to bring down. You
have here a very striking instance of the need to look also into
karma, if we want to understand the child.

This
is what I wanted to say to begin with, and tomorrow at the same hour
we will continue.